This project receives scientific and financial support from FAPERJ, within the framework of the Scientist of Our State Program (Call for Proposals No. 08/2025). The proposal is to study the ways in which the Fidesz government in Hungary has mobilized, since coming to power in 2010, inherited emotions and postmemory narratives about the Treaty of Trianon in order to produce feelings of belonging, national identity, and political cohesion.
To this end, I seek to demonstrate how the party activates a specific imaginary, already deeply rooted, of a nation that is at once grandiose and the innocent victim of foreign powers. My fundamental references are the concepts of postmemory, as developed by Marianne Hirsch (2008), and emotional communities, as proposed by Barbara Rosenwein (2006).
I propose to work with sources and objects of different kinds, such as specific legislation, political speeches, monuments, memorials, and museums. Analyzed as a whole, while also preserving their singularities, they form a representative set of the ways in which Fidesz mobilizes inherited emotions and postmemory narratives about the Treaty of Trianon.
The project will consider Hungary and narratives about Trianon in their singularity, while also approaching them as a paradigmatic case study through which to reflect on the mobilization of certain emotions and on the uses and appropriations of the past by radical-right regimes at the threshold of the twenty-first century.